Drum and bass, cars, bioinformatics, genomics, microbes and life in sunny Scotland

Monthly Archives: July 2006

Yes so a fair proportion of my Newcastle friends fly out to Brazil tomorrow for 2 weeks of basking in the sun, and maybe attending the odd conference. You’ll notice that the conference is the 6th to the 10th of Brazil. We’re coming back on the 12th. Should be an exciting and varied trip, seeing as everyone Brazilian has basically told us we’re going to get mugged. Repeatedly. Consequently everyone has bought cheapy watches, disposable cameras and has the intention of never travelling with more than about 10 quid on them. Safety comes in numbers so I suspect that Phil, Jen, Neil, Simon, Matt, Keith and myself are going to get even more well acquainted over the next 2 weeks!

The city is a place called Fortaleza, the hotels we’re staying in are basically ooh about 20 feet from some really nice beaches. Temperatures at this time of year are around 30oC, dropping to a minimal 25oC at night. There had better be air conditioning that’s all I can say, although after the last 2 weeks in the UK suspect we’re already acclimatised! There’s been much creeping excitement as to who can pack the most varied pharmacuticals into their luggage and a week of shopping trips as everyone reminds everyone else what they have forgotten.

So now its Friday afternoon and I want to go home and pack so I can crack open a cold Guinness and make my farewell phone calls, but ISS are holding me up by failing to relocate the servers that I desperately need to work on before I go. 9.30am they told me, as I kindly powered them off last night around 5pm. It’s now 2.30pm. Quite how long it takes to pull a 13A plug out of one socket, roll the rack across the room and plug it into another is anyones guess. But 5 hours seems a little excessive even for them.

I personally can’t wait to get away now, coming in this morning to find our unit website defaced (php sql injection to the CMS – no actual compromise) didn’t improve my stress levels one bit. Get me to the airport and get me out of here!

“ok, i’m mildly impressed with the cluster. A single blast job on my desktop takes ~2 minutes to complete. On the cluster using 8 threads, it’s done in ~3 seconds”

– Keith F on being let loose on our 96 CPU HP cluster.

And the cluster is very nice, although turning it on today after its powerdown was fun. So many switches and so little clue of which ones would make it leap into life and which ones would electrocute me.. We got there in the end. Glad I’m not working in the server room now though, it easily adds 5 degrees (centigrade) to the room when its turned on..